Charach Gallery brings back “Fabric of Survival” Holocaust exhibit

The Janice Charach Gallery is showing embroidery that Esther Krinitz created to show how the Nazis changed her hometown. This one, “Ordered to Leave Our Homes” shows the morning her family was ousted by the Gestapo.
Courtesy Charach Gallery

When Esther Nisenthal Krinitz wanted to share her childhood story with her daughters in a more visual way, she started in the way she knew best — stitching with a needle.

Her stories had been told, but the dressmaker wanted to show what her home looked like before the war.

At age 50, she began creating pictures on cloth using a needle and embroidery floss, to give her children a view of her life growing up in Poland during the Holocaust. She and her sister, Mania, were among the only survivors from her village, and the sole members of her family to escape to America.

“Once she realized she could tell her story with fabric and thread, she kept going till her death,” says Bernice Steinhart, daughter and co-founder of Art & Remembrance.

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Untrained as an artist, Krinitz stitched 36 pieces in a vivid primitive style, with colorful details and fabric collage elements, showing a dramatic story of escape, hiding in plain sight and all she experienced during the Nazi occupation.

Her daughters knew her works must be shared — both for their beauty and historical value.

In 2003, Steinhart and her sister created Art & Remembrance as a traveling exhibit to honor their mother. The exhibit gives a new look into the Holocaust from an inside perspective.

“This is not the Holocaust in black and white,” Steinhart says. “These are very vivid, very colorful and beautiful images, so people are drawn to it and able to feel, understand the experience of life and death at that time that they would not have otherwise had. Several people have told me that seeing my mother’s artwork was life-changing for them.”

In addition to appreciating the works, she says they are used “as a teaching tool and source of inspiration for others to tell their own stories of injustice and war and racism.”

“It was important to us, very important to us to be able not only to share our mother’s story but also to use it to inspire,” Steinhart says.

This is the second time “The Fabric of Survival” will be at Janice Charach Gallery.

The show, which has been seen in about 40 institutes around the United States, Canada and Europe, including Krinitz’s home country, returns to West Bloomfield Township from July 16 through Sept. 19.

Free and open to the public, this show features all of Krinitz’s works, with workshops and lectures. Holocaust Memorial Center docents will be on site during the grand opening to answer questions.

“People who see the exhibit are deeply moved by it,” Steinhart says. “They have insight into the experience of the Holocaust that they would not have otherwise had. Because it’s art and story, not just one or the other, it’s deeply moving and very accessible.”